Jade Oldfield conducts research on how play-based interventions can reshape cognitive skills for the better, particularly for incarcerated adults and youth who have been involved with the justice system.
In cooperation with the Chess for Life program, which provides weekly chess instruction and play-time to participants, Oldfield explores how chess can enhance executive functions such as cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibition. A graduate student, Oldfield is a winner of the 2024 Chessable Research Awards. In this guest post, she writes about the challenges and next steps for her research, which hopes to confirm the positive anecdotal evidence already gathered.

Chess Research: From Anecdotes to Concrete Numbers, a guest post by Jade Oldfield

The Background

I began my research with Chess for Life @ The University of Lethbridge (C4L) when I began my masters degree in Fall 2021. Like many research projects, data collection didn’t start until the following semester once we had ethics approval and all the pieces were in their correct places. Our goal was, and is, to capture the positive effects the program has on the youth that come through it in a quantitative way. More specifically, we’re hoping to answer the question: what is the impact of ~25 hours of chess play on the executive functions (EF) of adolescents who have been involved with the justice system? Over the years, we’ve collected incredible anecdotal stories and have seen youth flourish, but oftentimes policy makers and donors like to see “concrete” numbers to help gauge a program’s effectiveness; hence the beginning of the quantitative research.

My lab’s interest in chess stems from the potential for chess to impact EF in adolescents. While we are interested in three key EF measures (cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibition), the literature particularly supports improvements in working memory (Burgoyne et al., 2016; Grau-Pérez & Moreira, 2017; Oberoi, 2021) among other benefits. While EF is the main variable of interest, there is additional research to suggest that school-age chess participants may see improvements in math, language, and general cognitive abilities (Sala & Gobet, 2016). Additional research presented at the inaugural Saint Louis Chess Conference in October 2024 also suggests promising findings related to chess interventions and youth. In a similar study to what’s being undertaken by C4L, Dr. Anandita Oberoi et al. (2024) demonstrated that 14 hours of chess instruction had significant positive results on participants’ decision making and working memory. With respect to impulsivity, results were trending but not statistically significant. Furthermore, Dr. Brian Kisida and Dr. Matthew Pepper presented initial findings in their CAStLE study, showing that junior high students, in particular males, saw significant improvements in math and self-efficacy and a decrease in school infractions after the implementation of a daily chess instruction program (2024).

While our quantitative data collection is still in its infancy, the program itself has seen a great deal of anecdotal success. Back in 2018, an initial qualitative review was commissioned, and various youth and stakeholders were interviewed as part of the research. While the sample size was not large enough to move forward with publication, it helps provide a snapshot of the program’s reach. One past participant relates:

It’s (chess) helping me be able to process in conflict situations, like slowly and be able to kind of get a good understanding of things that are going on…it (chess) makes me be able to calm down and think a bit more clearly…and process a lot better instead of getting my emotions kind of drawn to whatever I’m thinking (anonymous participant, 2018).

The Program

C4L is a restorative justice program that aims to provide youth who have been involved with the justice system with an enriching and educational way to serve their sentence or community service hours. Youth visit us on Fridays between 1-3 p.m. and we provide them with food, chess instruction, and mentorship. The afternoon is relatively flexible but includes a few key activities: we give the youth a chance to have a bite to eat, engage them in some chess play, and halfway through the afternoon we’ll introduce a lesson. After that, we’ll often use games or chess play to reinforce the topic covered in that day’s lesson. We also provide youth with bus passes to help them get to and from the program to help remove any additional barriers.

What I didn’t realize, when beginning the research, was that there would be barriers beyond food and transportation; invisible barriers. When working with any vulnerable population, there are always many things to consider, but one thing we were not able to foresee was lack of interest and participation in the research component of the program. So far, the reasons for this vary. For some, they simply didn’t want to spend the 45 minutes completing the testing; for others, they lost interest during the testing; others really wanted to play chess; and for others yet, they just simply didn’t want to — which is absolutely their prerogative. In addition to this, some of the youth we work with only need to serve 10 hours with us, and when we’re hoping to test the effectiveness of playing 20-25 hours of chess, this introduces another hurdle.

While we have faced some challenges running the research program, the C4L program is still incredibly strong and successful. Over the course of 2024, we have averaged around two-to-three new participants per month, with a total of 18 new participants throughout the year. Not all participants are young offenders, but often youth will bring a friend to help ease themselves into the program. Others are community members who connected with C4L through a school visit, and wanted to continue to participate in the program. Throughout 2024, C4L has served 29 youth who have played over 278 hours of chess.

Adult Correctional Centre

In 2024, with our local correctional centre, we’ve worked with 15 incarcerated males who have completed a total of 271 hours of chess to-date; we will be running post-testing on our second cohort over the next couple of weeks.

While you might think that this demographic might be fairly stable in terms of location and consistent participation, the reality is otherwise, and we’ve experienced similar challenges to the youth program when conducting research with the adults. During our first research cohort with our local correctional centre, we started with eight participants, quickly moved to seven, and by the time we were ready to conduct post-testing, we had lost 4/7 participants to transfers or removals, therefore only collecting full data sets on three participants. The second cohort at this centre has run significantly smoother with no participants exiting the program. Post-testing will be conducted on December 11 & 18, 2024, and at this point we should have a total of 11 data sets between the two cohorts. This will provide us with a small sample that we hope to be able to determine some initial trends from.

The Future

While the research has been a bit “messy,” the overall impact and interest in the program continues to grow. The C4L team has had multiple conversations with potential new partners since the summer of 2024, and is working on establishing programs within additional youth correctional facilities, a local school and expanding programming within our local correctional centre. In addition to this, we are also hoping to bolster the research by running a condensed program with our current youth correctional centre partner in February 2025, and we have had multiple local organizations inquiring about getting involved in some way.

Currently, the research runs broader than it does deep, but we are working with our partners to strengthen the research base. In addition to this, I am excited to be continuing on to a PhD in January 2025, and I’m looking forward to advancing the research with C4L. Having navigated the challenges discussed above, we hope to potentially shift the research design to a mixed-methods approach, so we can also capture qualitative data in order to paint a fuller picture of the program and participant outcomes. As previously indicated, the literature supporting the benefits of chess is only becoming more robust, and with any luck, the success we’re seeing in C4L will join that body of literature in the near future.

References

Burgoyne, A. P., Sala, G., Gobet, F., Macnamara, B. N., Campitelli, G., & Hambrick, D. Z. (2016). The relationship between cognitive ability and chess skill: A comprehensive meta-analysis. Intelligence, 59, 72–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2016.08.002 

Grau-Pérez, G., & Moreira, K. (2017). A study of the influence of chess on the executive functions in school-aged children /estudio del impacto del ajedrez sobre las funciones ejecutivas en niños de Edad Escolar. Studies in Psychology, 38(2), 473–494. https://doi.org/10.1080/02109395.2017.1295578 

Kisida, B. & Pepper, M.  (2024, October 24-26). CAStLE: Chess attainment study in St. Louis [Conference presentation]. Saint Louis Chess Conference, St. Louis, MO, United States. https://registration.stlchessconference.org/the-saint-louis-chess-conference

Oberoi, A. (2021). Using chess as an intervention to improve executive functioning among youth (Publication No. 11211) [Doctoral dissertation, Walden University]. ScholarWorks.

Oberioi, A., Hickman, G., Benoliel, B., & Matthey, S. (2024, October 24-26). Chess as an intervention to improve executive functioning among youth [Conference presentation]. Saint Louis Chess Conference, St. Louis, MO, United States. https://registration.stlchessconference.org/the-saint-louis-chess-conference

Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2016). Do the benefits of chess instruction transfer to academic and cognitive skills? A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 18, 46–57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2016.02.002

See this blog post about Chessable-supported researchers, including Jade Oldfield, who presented at the 2024 Saint Louis Chess  Conference.

The 2024 Chessable Research Awards had five student winners, including Oldfield. Chessable looks forward to applications for the 2025 cycle of the Chessable Research Awards. Applications open January 15, 2025. For more information, please visit this link.